Alexandre Larose

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Alexandre Larose (Canada) is a French-Canadian filmmaker born in Montréal, Québec. He received his BEng Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sherbrooke (2001); a BFA from Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema (2006); and an MFA in Studio Arts, Film Production from Concordia University (2013). His moving-image practice investigates phenomena of appearance and representation as translated by the media of optics and celluloid. His approach relies on a methodical stripping out of layers embedded in both the live subjects and the technique that translates them into visual artifacts. Larose’s films have garnered numerous awards, including the Grand Prix and Critics’ Award from 25FPS Festival (Zagreb), Fuji Award from EX-IS Festival (Seoul), Grand Prix from Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the International Jury Award for Best Film, Hamburg International Short Film Festival. His films have screened widely at the George Eastman Museum (Rochester), Belarusian State University (Minsk), Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, Germany), Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), Foundation for Contemporary Art (Kiev), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), International Film Festival Rotterdam, IMAGE Forum (Tokyo), Mostra de Cinema Periférico (A Coruña), Message to Man International Film Festival (St. Petersburg), and hundreds more venues internationally.

ALEXANDRE LAROSE'S BROUILLARD - PASSAGE #14

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: December 2 – December 23, 2020

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: brouillard - passage #14, 10 min, 2013

brouillard - passage #14, 10 min, 2013

A path that extends from my family’s backyard into Lac-Saint-Charles (Québec City), condensed in multiple layers.

39 walking trajectories from the filmmaker’s parents’ house into a lake nearby are superimposed onto a 1000-foot strip of 35 mm color reversal film. With the aperture just slightly opened, only the brightest spots of each walk leave a trace on the strip which is put under strain by having to go through the camera again and again. On the screen we see a landscape of pulsating light that is both concrete and abstract at the same time, drawing attention to the material and chemical processes of the medium as well as the visceral qualities these can produce. A phantom ride where the phantom seems to be both the camera that registers as well as the world it records. – Alejandro Bachmann

While Larose has developed an overall program that emphasizes technological inquiry that clearly distinguishes human from machined vision and sight from construct, his brouillard series does evince a romantic sensibility underlying these gestures. The series has its nearest relative in the final iterations of French Impressionist plein-air painter Claude Monet’s The Water Lilies (1899-1926). On the surface, both brouillard and the Water Lilies are pitched between the consolation of naturalism and the agitation of a romantic, abstracting formalism. But the similarity between the two projects also lies with each artist’s relation to time and vision. Monet’s series was developed over time from his estate in Giverny, and in his final decade the paintings became increasingly disconnected from their subject. They began to reflect the artist’s failing eyesight, and he even began to repaint earlier stations of the series with his newly ruptured vision; colour and form changed by his cataracts. Like Monet, whose Water Lilies had been painted within the same environment and over a long course of time, Alexandre Larose has forged these walks in all of their repetitions and variations into a holy and singular act—a grand rumination on the rule of time which rustles leaves and melts grass and blurs the memory of our steps. – Stephen Broomer

Read the full article in Backflash here.

Screening co-presented with the Canadian Filmmaker’s Distribution Centre.